Saturday, 17 November 2012

I didn't put an X in the Box

Well the elections for the Police
Commissioners are now over and on Thursday I did what I have done
regularly over the last 50 or so years and trotted off to the polling
station and made a mark on the voting form.

But this time it was different and for
the first time ever I didn't put a cross into any of the boxes. For
my reasons see below the fold.

The first of my doubts is “Why
Change?” The politicians, who are kept well informed by
disgruntled members of the public, will know the more visible
problems – and will be used to promising that “something needs to
be done about it”. They fail to realise that idealistic solutions
merely shuffle the difficulties round, and that the simpler and
cheaper solution of patching up the worse problems will usually be
the quickest and easiest solution. Rushing through inadequately
assessed revolutionary changes for ideological reasons, without
proper long-term pilots, simply produces new unanticipated crisis
areas.

The second relates to representation of
the public interests. Policing involves all sections of the community
and while the composition of the old Police Authorities was not ideal
they included people who had a wide range of experience of life, and
some at least, were elected councillors. When issues came up there
would usually be at least one person who had first hand knowledge of
the area under consideration. No one person, however brilliant, can
have that breadth of knowledge what is going on in all the different
social contexts in a population (in the case of Hertfordshire) of a
million people. Replacing a committee of people with varied
backgrounds, coming from different parts of the country, with a
single individual can only mean that the interests of the wider
public will be less well represented.

I am also very concerned about the
introduction of politics into policing. I want the best person
available to do the job, with a clear understanding that they should
be genuinely independent of political influences. If they are elected
with a political label they cannot be seen to be
independent, and in any case I don't want elections to include
obvious incompetents simply because all the main parties consider
they must have a candidate. Because many people vote zombie-like
along political lines, rather than for the individual candidate's
qualities, one can expect that some individual Police Commissioners
trust selected to be bad at their job.

Further to the last point I consider
the introduction of political police commissioners as the thin end of
a wedge, where judges, school headmasters, hospital consultants are
elected from lists of people who think that membership of a named
political party is more important than their competence.

So why was a change made which reduced
that influence of the public, by reducing a committee with many
different skills and experiences to a single politically biased
candidate – under the name of “democracy”. May I suggest one
reason. If you have a single person in charge, rather than a
committee, it is far easier for the government to apply pressure to
become a “yes man” for government imposed policy If the police
commissioner is a a member of the government party he will be
expected to “conform”. If he is a member of an Opposition party
the Government can dismiss his complaints because “he is only
complaining because he supports the opposition”. Police Authorities
many have been rather spineless in the past – but the current
legislation actually makes it hard for the Police Commissioner to
whistleblow that “We cannot provide the service our public wants
because of the Government imposed funding rules.”

And finally the whole conduct of the
election – and the way in which it was made very hard for genuine
independent candidates to stand – and which also excluded otherwise
well-qualified candidate because of a comparatively minor
misdemeanour many years ago – was seriously flawed. In
Hertfordshire less than 15% voted, and less than half these put the
eventual winner as their first choice. In addition well over 3000
people (including me) specifically went to the polling station to
record a “spoilt ballot”. The pathetic excuses made by the Prime
Minister and Theresa May was no more than an admission that they knew
in advance that it would be a farce. It is not democracy if you plan an election in such a way that you know only a few people will vote.

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About Me

A.K.A. Hertfordshire Chris -
I am, by temperament, a scientist who likes to stand back and get an overview - rather than getting stuck in a narrow specialist area. I am particularly interested in how people process information and how we could design systems that fit into the way that people think.
Since I retired I have been very much involved in mental health service provision (but have recently retired from all committee work) and I run a web site at www.hertfordshire-genealogy.co.uk which provides help and advice for people whose ancestors lived in Hertfordshire.